


None to Help, None to Uphold

by DrJekyl



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Angst and Feels, Blood Magic, F/F, Fae & Fairies, Grief/Mourning, Modern Era, Pre-Canon, The Crystal Court, can be read as pearlnet if you're that way inclined, implied/referenced suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 07:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12007641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrJekyl/pseuds/DrJekyl
Summary: Rose and Pearl have always met the price of Pearl's freedom willingly, together, in the midsummer ritual of blood, bread and iron.  The price of Pearl's continued life, however, is steeper, due in the heart of the winter, and can only be paid alone.  Steven has survived his first year and been Named, and Pearl has survived a full year without Rose and without paying - but only just.





	None to Help, None to Uphold

**Author's Note:**

> Best to have read some of the other works in the collection first, particularly [By My Own Hand or None](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/SU_CrystalCourt/works/11488323), [The Name of the Rose](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/SU_CrystalCourt/works/11509797) and [In the Name of Freedom](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/SU_CrystalCourt/works/11692896).

Steven was an autumn child.

That was, perhaps, the most baffling of a series of inexplicable decisions Rose had made over the past few years.  Decisions where Pearl’s input had not been so much unwelcome as completely unsought; the cruelest cut of all.  In her darker moments, she had to almost admire how the tables had been so very turned.  How it was the _mortal_ who beguiled and charmed and stole with a sly smile and lying eyes.  How it was the _elf_ who turned away from all family, sense and reason to chase a dream that would leach away her very essence unto death.

Had she a say, had she the _chance_ for a say, Pearl would have said that the boy should have been born in the first few days of spring (if at all, if at all, _if at all!_ ).  The height of Rose’s power and strength, not so late into summer that the first leaves were already dropping.  He should have been crawling by the time the first snows came, not a weak, chubby infant barely able to support his own head.

Perhaps if he’d been a spring child, things would have been different.  Perhaps Rose-

Pearl had avoided him as much as possible after their first meeting, after Garnet and Amethyst, Pearl at their side, had acted in accordance with their nature and stolen him away.  Pearl had held the squirming infant in her arms, felt the slight and fragile weight of his body, seen the way his head bobbed unsteadily on his neck, and had known, _known_ with such frightening and bone-deep certainty that she’d nearly dropped him, that there was a way to trade back his life for Rose’s.

She had stared into those big, dark eyes, so like his mother’s and yet not, and fair trembled from the temptation.  And he had _laughed._ It was almost as if he had known it too, or known that Pearl’s coming weeks and months would be plagued with a strange and nameless agony atop her renewed grief.

When she held him again, nearly a year later on his Naming Day, he was tottering and babbling and pressing favours into her hands, and she had loved him instantly.  Garnet and Amethyst had loved him too.  Everyone did.  To meet him was to be smitten, to become utterly besotted.  

Charmed.

And _that_ had been worrying enough to finally snap Pearl out of her grief-induced stupor.  She would not, could not, was _oathbound_ to not let Rose’s son grow into a monster.  She’d seen the same realisation and concern in Garnet’s tense shoulders and pursed lips, and in Amethyst’s puzzled frown.  She’d heard it in their blessings too.

The Blessings - _oh_ , words chosen in haste, unprepared.  She was certain that was going to come back to haunt them.  

They’d agreed, back at the Temple, on the standard trio of health, wealth and happiness.  They practically had a script for it, these days, Pearl leading with health, Amethyst following with wealth, Garnet with happiness, and then Rose with-

But Garnet led for Steven, and blessed the boy with empathy: compassion enough to understand the feelings of others and see the world through their eyes.  Amethyst had followed, unusually serious, with the gift of fellowship, that he’d find companions, good and true, who would see through the glamour and love him for who he was.  

And then it was Pearl’s turn. Pearl, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on-end from the sudden presence of power and weight of import, found herself fumbling for words.  Found that all of those she’d carefully chosen for her blessing completely fled from her mind.  Found herself, in other words, at a complete loss.

In the end, she’d blessed him, haltingly, as she thought Rose would have wanted: with the freedom to choose his own destiny. And then there was a cough from Greg, the boy’s father, and the tension broke in an uncertain round of applause from the humans present.  This was quickly followed by an obnoxious little song, a ritual of candles whose origins were lost in time, cake, sugar-laden carbonated beverages and a general atmosphere of merriment.

Pearl declined the food and drink and felt nauseous, uncertain if it was the overwhelming smell of processed sugar or the sudden certainty that their words, chosen in haste, would have unintended consequences.  It was hard enough to prevent such at the best of times, let alone when you were making things up on the fly.  Words, the choice of them, mattered.  They weren’t something you could take back.

Later, having escaped the ‘party’ early in favor of the safety of her room at the Temple, Pearl took stock and found herself wanting.

Defeat was one thing.  Never a pleasant thing, certainly, but there was still honor to be had in holding the line and ensuring an orderly retreat.   _Rout_ though… Rout was another matter entirely.  Yet her flight from the world could be described in no other terms. Pearl had let herself be driven from the field in confusion and disarray to her final redoubt.  There, in dereliction of all duty and reason, she had hidden away like a chastised and bewildered child, without even sense enough to care for her own wounds.

Her reflection, when she stilled one of her pools, held a version of herself not seen for centuries, one not seen since she’d realised that bread and salt and summer sun were at once not enough and far, far too much.  The slightest of pink flushes to her skin, a hue that in another might have implied returning health and not warned of impending fever.  The same fever-warning was present in the too-bright sheen of her eyes, and again in the hue of them, a step away from pale grey ice over rivers and one closer to the intense, burning indigo of an endless summer sky.

It was a small mercy that she wasn’t _sweating_ yet, really, a process as distasteful as it was uncomfortable.

When she gave into the inevitable and found a true mirror, she was unsurprised to find other warning signs.  They were far too faint for another to spot, not this early on, but stood as a clear warning to Pearl, just the same.  The barest suggestion of crows’ feet around her eyes.  Thinning skin, drawing the bone beneath into sharper relief.  Strands of silver in the roots of her hair.

If she had needed any further confirmation, any at all, it came a month later, when she returned to the Arena for the first time in over a year, since Rose- since Steven’s birth.  There was a slight resistance, only _just_ felt, at the end of her stretches as she limbered herself to spar.  The loss of just a hair’s worth of speed and flexibility, made evident in a fresh cut across her cheek before she dispatched her summoned foe.  Blood oozing beneath her probing fingers.  Sticky and purple and _warm_.

The thaw was setting in.  Another year or two, three at most, and she’d tip past thaw and into decay, and then burn up from within.  And Rose…

Pearl almost had to laugh.

Rose had probably thought herself foresightful, if not actually _clever,_ in binding Pearl to midsummer and her rite of renewal.  She had wrapped it up so very neatly in all of those other little promises she had made Pearl swear to honour, binding her by heart in place of name.  But she had not thought to bind Pearl to the midwinter.  To the Balancing.  Nothing in her other oaths required it of her either.  Not by the letter.  She was not obliged to continue it.  She had, in fact, missed last year already.

Oh, _Rose_ …

It was a colossal oversight, especially when it came to ensuring the protection of Rose’s son.  But it was also, in many ways, not a surprising one.  Despite her age, her ages of rebellion, Rose sometimes- _had_ sometimes found it hard to go against her nature.  And Rose was- _had been_ a creature of Spring.  In summer, she saw the promise of life fulfilled, not the crops that died for lack of water, the trees that dried brown beneath an unforgiving sun and burnt to ash with the first spark.  Likewise, her only true understanding of the frost was its thawing.  What winter took - sun, warmth, life - not what it gave.  That Pearl could not just endure but embrace the winter, even after all Winter had taken from her, was something that Rose had admitted, more than once, that she found troubling.

But embrace it it Pearl had, a thousand times now.  She had taken the winter so well and so deeply into her heart that she knew the season like a lover, fondness falling from her lips at the first hint of snow.  

Perhaps that had been the wedge between them in the end.  Between her and Rose.  Year by year, little by little, Pearl had fallen in love with the anathema.  Year by year, little by little, she had grown steadily less human.  That hadn’t changed her feelings for Rose - not in the slightest! - but, year by year and little by little, the space between them had grown until it was big enough for another.  Someone who wasn’t a discarded plaything, who hadn’t wielded a sword without fear or favour or feeling for the amusement of her betters.  Someone who wasn’t kept alive centuries out of her own time by magics that verged on the abominable.  Someone who could give her the things Pearl could not.  

Someone entirely human.  

Somewhere out there, somewhere in great unexplored cosmos, some remnant trickster-god must have been laughing themselves sick at the irony of it.  Twice now, Pearl had given herself over to winter for the sake of another; twice now she had been left with nothing but a frozen heart and empty arms.  

She remembered little of the first time other than the feeling of it, ice beneath her raw knees, tongue numb to her desperate pledge, overtaken by a burning cold that filled her to overflowing, leaving room for nothing else, not even regret.  It had been centuries before she’d discovered the tiny, faint echoes of her old self that survived behind the ice.  Longer still before she’d found the stubborn, tiny ember of rage that had kept them alive.

The second time, the second embrace, stood out so vividly in her mind that to close her eyes and think of it was to be there again.  Atop the bitter, snow-swept henge, her body trembling with fear and with fever as the snow melted in circles around her bare feet.  The stinging wind dying from howling to whispering to still as the witching hour approached, leaving her in silence broken only by her own harsh breath and the unaccustomed beat of her heart, faster, faster, a rabbit caught in a snare.  Smoke from the fire, bitter-sweet and primal, its hissing protests as she killed it without mercy, down to the very last spitting, steaming embers.  Sweat beading her temples, dripping into her eyes.  The thaw, once welcome, had continued too long, leaving her wracked with fever, the ravages of age and worse upon her body.

Her right hand had been too slick upon the knife of knapped obsidian, sweat upon her palm, her fingers dripping from an earlier slip of the blade that did little to aid her weak grip.  Pearl had pressed the fingers of her left to her chapped lips as if she could hold the remnants of Rose’s last kiss there, but could only taste the ash she’d gathered and placed upon her tongue.  And for the first time since deciding to fight the fire consuming her, fear had welled up from deep within, that it wouldn’t work, that she would die here, atop the lonely, bitter hill.  That if she did, Rose would never forgive herself.  That even if Pearl lived, Rose would still not.

That had been the crux of it.  Pearl had found herself remarkably content, otherwise, to let the fever run its course, secure in the knowledge that her second life had been as wonderful as it had been short. Rose, however, was distraught.  It had been her gift of life, that fateful day amidst the thorns and flowers, that freed Pearl to walk at her side and under no-one’s heel.  Her gift of the spring, the summer, melting the last of the ice that bound her fast to the Unseelie Court, to the terrible Queen. But the spell had been woven in haste, improvised, and fraught with oversight; the result, imperfect. Pearl was burning alive from within, and no amount of work on Rose’s part had been able to fix it, not without unweaving the spell completely.

Pearl, by nature and by practice, could endure a great many things, but never the thought of bringing her Rose pain.  A year of thought and of study, of consulting sages and spirits and stranger things lead her to the heart of their dilemma.  They needed something to act as the balance, for the summer sun, for the fae magic, for the gift of life.  The solution, from there, was as obvious as it was terrifying.  Human magic, older than memory, older than guest-right.  Life, paid for with life.  The hope for a new summer written in blood, steaming red upon the snow.  

The Blót.

Not always called that, of course, and never known by that name in some of the places it was practiced.  Its original purpose wouldn’t suit Pearl either, a sacrificial plea for winter’s end when what she lacked, what she desired, was, in fact, its resurgence.  But there was room to work with around the edges of the thing, if someone was desperate enough.  Pearl had been desperate enough and more: willing to gamble her life for a chance to steal from the very heart of winter, from Winter herself.  And so, atop that bitter henge, trembling with fear and with fever, fervent in her desire to live on for Rose, she had raised the knife and done what was needed.

It had changed her, of course.  Power always did.   _Taking_ power, moreso.  She had walked up the hill, stricken and weak, but as close to human as she could ever remember being.  She had walked down again with the snow dancing in playful eddies about her feet, the wears of age and time banished from her skin and bones, her heart still and silent, unbeating in her chest.

Rose had wept.  She had held Pearl close and tightly, and professed repeatedly that she was relieved, but she’d wept nonetheless.  And so it went, year upon year.  Pearl would climb, would wield the blade, and would return having taken a little bit more this year than the last.  Rose would wait for her, weep for her, and they would not speak of it until the time came again.  Year upon year upon year, until the last.  Until Steven.

Garnet had known what was required, of course.  She’d gone so far as to lure Pearl out into the woods, last midwinter, on some flimsy pretext, and then sat with her all night as the fire died and the wind dropped and the hour approached.  She had watched Pearl place the ash upon her tongue, to stave off the gnawing hunger, but when Pearl had reached for the knife, in full knowledge that the ritual would not work with another beside her, Garnet’s hand had been there to stop her.  They’d done enough for her to see the year through, she’d said.  There would be another winter, she’d said.

Pearl did not remember, not clearly, what had happened next, but she did know that words had been said that could not be unsaid, nor easily forgiven.  That they had not spoken again for another three months.  She had a debt there now.  One sitting alongside all that she owed Rose.  That she had sworn to the child.

The cut had not yet faded from her cheek by the afternoon that she left her room in the Temple, the knife at her belt.  Garnet was waiting for her before the Gate, arms crossed against her chest, her brow raised in silent challenge at Pearl’s approach.

“I’ll- I’ll be fine this time.  You don’t need to- I’ll do it _properly_ ,” Pearl stuttered, head bowed, eyes lowered.   When Garnet didn’t move, didn’t make to reply, Pearl forced herself to raise her head, to meet Garnet’s hidden eyes. “I’ll do it right.  I promise.”  When even that didn’t seem enough, she stepped forward, laid a hand lightly upon Garnet’s arm.  “I’ll come back.”

Garnet stared at her a long time, whether searching her face or searching the future Pearl couldn’t say.  Whatever she saw or Saw seemed to satisfy her, and she gave a short little nod, covering Pearl’s hand briefly with her own before stepping aside.

“I can wait for you,” Garnet said.  “At the hill.  If you want.”

Pearl’s first instinct was to say - to shout! - ‘no’.  That was for Rose, Rose’s place and nobody else’s.  Nobody else understood.  

Nobody, perhaps, but Garnet.  Garnet, to whom she owed a very great debt indeed.

“I’d like that,” she said instead, and was surprised to find she meant it.

They passed through the Gate together, their feet light but sure upon the Way.  Garnet helped her gather firewood, something Rose had never done, and she only stole away once night had truly fallen, Pearl letting the fire ebb down to embers.  When the witching hour came and the wind died and the snowfall slowed, Pearl, alone atop the hill, rose, took a handful of ash, took the knife, let Winter into her heart and paid for eternal frost with the blood of a king.

When she came back down the hill, frost following her heels, her heart silent in her chest, Garnet didn’t weep.  But she did hold Pearl close and tightly, and they returned home together.


End file.
